New members of the i2b2 team

Brian Wilson (bioinformatics and statistical genetics) and Guergana Savova (natural language processing) both from the Mayo Institute have just joined the i2b2 team. Welcome to both!

AMIA Translational Summit

Shawn, Zak, Susanne, Vivian, Mike, and Griffin attended the AMIA Translational Informatics Summit 2010 in SF. There were several i2b2 events including a) a packed three and half hour tutorial b) an overview of i2b2 applications c) an evening AUG meeting. Lots of interest, good questions and interesting developments.

Major Depressive Disorder

Perlis, Iosifescu et al,,

Discussed the artifact that definitionally happens in clinical trials of assigning individuals to responder and non-responder categories when in fact the data always shows that the vast majority of individuals are oscillating in the spectrum in between. So unlike 8 week trial studies of antidepressants where there has to be an assignment of response vs no-response, these dense clinical data call for the application of other metrics such as proportion of days feeling "well." Unfortunately, such quality-of-life metrics don't go particularly well with many reviewers.

Rheumatology/Rheumatoid Arthritis

Plenge, Karlson, Liao et al.,

Planning for Kat's maternity leave.

• Improving smoking history.
  • Discussed the challenge of inaccurate notes by "cut and paste" documenters.
• Improving family history.
• Starting gene-environment analysis

Large pharmaceutical companies interested in collaboration.

Major Depressive Disorder

Perlis, Iosifescu et al.

Dan Iosifescu announced he is moving to Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He had a great job offer there and we wish him well.

Victor discussed several tactics to increase the number of pertinent notes for NLP. There is quite a bit of validation effort required.

T-con with Leicester

We just had an interesting discussion with Nick Holden and his colleagues about the adoption in the UK of i2b2 for discovery studies.

Rheumatoid arthritis

Kat presenting: RA and coronary artery disease risk and dissecting the contribution of risk factors in the non-RA population (for CAD) to CAD in the RA population. This will include a broad overview of the auto-immunity landscape.